


Due Light to the Misled and Lonely Traveller

by a_wide_and_roiling_sea



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate universe- canon setting, Brienne is the Evenstar, Don’t let the summary scare you, F/M, Fluff, No Incest, a not quite Stardust Au, alternate univers- canon era, but it’s a slightly kinder and gentler Westeros, it isn’t angsty, no no she is literally a star
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25915522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_wide_and_roiling_sea/pseuds/a_wide_and_roiling_sea
Summary: Forlorn and sick with love and wine, he felt the world begin to spin as he gracelessly lowered himself to the ground.  Reclining in the tall grass he took deep, even breaths and focused on the only star left in the twilit sky.  ‘Please’, he thought, wishing, praying to any thing that might  listen, ‘please don’t let love leave me. Give me back my honor so that my love might stay’.***Jaime learns the hard way that some wishes come true.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 17
Kudos: 42
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KayJayTeal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayJayTeal/gifts).



> For KayJayTeal.  
> Happy Fic Exchange! I’m so sorry it took me so long to post this. I hope you haven’t been anxiously waiting for it. As I was reading other works in the exchange i had a crisis of confidence and at the last minute decide to redo the story. I fear it is still a meager offering but hope that you’ll enjoy it none the less.  
> Title taken from a line by John Milton

Chapter 1

The inky blackness of night had just begun to settle at the bottom of the horizon when he stumbled drunkenly through the doors of the keep. Inside the hall the last of the revelers were singing loudly and off key, raising toasts to the happy and fruitful union that had been announced at the feast to night.

King Rhaegar was to marry Lady Cersei in three turns of the moon.

When Jaime had arrived at Tarth this morning he had thought to spend tonight in the very same woman’s arms.In truth, he had thought of almost nothing else since the invitation to attend the King’s summer court had arrived.He had been so certain that this time Cersei would relent, would agree to marry him despite his ruined reputation and their own broken betrothal.Surely she suffered as he suffered when they were apart and was as eager as he to begin the life they had spent their youths imagining. 

They had been ten years old when their fathers arranged their engagement. Jaime, who at that tender age had only ever envisioned a future filled with daring deeds and the type of honor and glory that could only be hard won on the battle field, had balked when his father had informed him that his newlyintended would be spending the summer at their ancestral home so that the two might become acquainted.If Jaime was ever to become the valiant knight he was sure he was destined to be, and he was quite sure, he could not spare the practice time. He longed to be no where else but the training yards-drilling, sparing, honing his skill with a blade. But he was Lord Tywin Lannister’s only son, heir to his titles, lands, and riches and all the responsibilities and expectations that came with them.This match was advantageous to the Lannister’spower, would extend their influence northward where the people there were mistrustful of the mighty lions greed and ambition.This duty to uphold and strengthen his family’s legacy was of the utmost importance, was perhaps the only thing that truly mattered to his father at all.Quietly he supposed that part of a knight’s code was the courteous and chivalroustreatment of fair maidens and at the very least her visit would afford him thatopportunity.

And so it was under those circumstances that Jaime had first met Cersei. She had arrived in an impeccably tailored gown, crimson velvet with golden lace detailing as if to say how well his house colors suited her fair skin and delicate features.He had never seen a prettier girl. 

Beautiful as she was, he had expected to find her company boring.A lady, especially one as well bred as herself, would have no interest in the histories of great battles or the deeds of brave knights.She would be too demure by half to jump from the cliffs and into the sea or explore the winding caves below the castle. And she certainly would not wish to pass an afternoon in the hazy summer heat of the training yards.But she had surprised him; had listened to his tales with rapt attention, was unafraid of the dark in the caves, and would cheer for him when he bested a squire in a bout. 

On the eve of her departure Jaime had managed to knock the sword from his opponents hand in a resounding victory and presented her with a single rose, promising that one day he would win a tournament and name her his queen of love and beauty. She had leaned over the railing and kissed his check and he had loved her ever since.

As the years passed, Jaime grew tall and strong and handsome.His prowess as a fighter nearly unrivaled, now knighted and anointed.Cersei’s beauty bloomed along with the rest of her, sharp eyes and a sweet smile belying sharper teeth.They spent their summers together, at the Rock or at her home, and once- their last- at the Red Keep in Kings Landing.

Jaime would have been glad to spend the last summer of their betrothal swimming in the warm waters of the Sunset Sea and stealing away to the caves they had roamed as children, but Cersei had been keen on visiting the capital.She had been eager to make her introduction to the political scene, to size up friend and foe and learn how both might be used to further their causes. Jaime couldn’t imagine what those might be.As a Lannister she would have wealth, power, influence and the love of a man who would give her anything else she desired. She had stared at him with something akin to disappointment and asked if didn’t he know there was never enough of those things. There was always more to be had; more power, more wealth, more influence.More love too he supposed, and so, as a token of his devotion, they had accompanied his father to Kings Landing. 

The rumors of King Aerys mercurial temperament had been long standing. Tales of cruel and unusual punishments meted out for minor infractions had begun to trickle out of the capital with increasing frequency.His father had warned him not to cross the king for any reason lest he find himself on the receiving end of the aging monarchs wrath.Still, Jaime had not been prepared for the muted paranoia that seemed to hang over the city and its inhabitants. The air was heavy and stagnant and yet most people stayed in doors with their windows closed. They had quiet conversations with their eyes cast down, scared of being overheard.Inside the keep, the tension was just as palpable. If the king was in good spirits, dinner would be lively. Music and mead and conversation flowing freely.If he were not, the evening passed in near silence.A serving girl might be whipped for spilling wine or the entire untouched meal thrown into the gutters for fear it had been poisoned.The king seemed to fear the Lords of his council as much he hated them, seizing any opportunity to slight or humiliate them.

Jaime had been fifteen years old when he fought in his first battle. He knew that for all his skill and cunning he was as likely to die in combat as any other man, but he was strong and brave and only a little afraid. What he remembered most clearly from that day was the eerie calm that existed in the moment just before the horns of war bellowed; the opposing forces standing at the ready on either side of the field, waiting, caught in the split second between the present and the irrevocable change the next would bring.

He felt that same weighty stillness in the throne room.The king was mad, corrupted by his greed, cruel and mistrustful of all those around him, making enemies of his allies. Soon, the horns would sound and war would follow. 

Until then, all anyone could do was lie low.Life in the Red Keep had been dull and oppressive.He had spent his mornings in their guest chambers pretending not to eavesdrop while his father took clandestine meetings behind closed doors in the solar.In the afternoon he sparred with the knights in the training yard and at night he took his own clandestine meetings with Cersei in the tunnels he had discovered ran from the bowels of the keep down to the shore.A few coins slipped to the guards would buy them an hour’s privacy. They had arranged for Jaime to arrive before her to bribe the soldiers and wait for her inside the passageway. 

In hindsight, he should have suspected something was amiss when the white cloaks stationed at the entrance were already gone when he approached the tunnels, but he had thought that perhaps they were just eager to rendezvous with their own paramours.

The labyrinthine tunnels under the keep forked and splintered in all directions once you descended the stair case and Jaime dared not venture too far for fear of getting lost.Some paths were large and wide enough to march an army through while others were so narrow and low only a single person could pass on their hands and knees. He suspected that they led to any number of locations throughout the city, some perhaps long enough to reach outside the gates.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the cavern he noticed the faint flicker of light down the corridor.He swore under his breath as the light grew brighter as the person neared. He ducked down the path to the right of the stair case and pressed himself to the rock wall.Soon he could hear the muffled sounds of a conversation.As they approached he recognized the voices as belonging to the king and the alchemistic maester.What he had heard next had made his blood run cold. 

While his father and the other lords of the high court had been quietly strategizing how to bring the king to heel, Aerys had been plotting alone in his high tower.The alchemists had created for him a potion that once ignited, burnt so hot that not even water could extinguish it. Thousands of jars of the stuff had been placed around the city, the last of them delivered to these very tunnels tonight. If he must die, then all of Kings Landing would burn in effigy for him in perpetuity and through that eternal flame he would live forever.Or so he’d said just before Jaime had run him through with his sword. The alchemist had screamed then and Jaime had killed him too so that the knowledge of wildfire might die with him.And so it was that the guards found him standing over the smiling corpse of the mad king. 

He’d done it to save his father. He’d done it to save Cersei. He’d done it to save the city and because his honor demanded it.He had vowed to protect the innocent after all. But he could say none of that without having to reveal the secret ofthe wildfire so he’d told them they ought to thank him when the council questioned him. The quickest way to win a war was to prevent it from taking place and that was what he’d done. They had all known the king would never have relinquished the throne if not by force.

By law, the prince, now king, should have taken his head, at the very least he ought to have draped him in a black cloak and sent him to the wall, but Tywin Lannister was very powerful and very rich and he could not risk a war with the Westerlands for beheading his son.Still, a man could not kill a king and go unpunished. Jaime was stripped of his knighthood, his title, and his right to inherit. As a final insult to his pride the king had added that his birthright might be restored to him if ever he could recover his honor.

He was sent back to Casterly Rock, no longer his father’s heir but his natural son.To Jaime it had seemed a lenient judgement, better to let the Rock go to his clever cousin Tyrion anyways, but Tywin had raged.It seemed he had much less use for a son. 

A sennight after his return, a raven arrived announcing the formal dissolution of his betrothal and the last good thing Jaime had was gone.

He passed lonely years with little to do but simmer in his resentment. His father spent most of his time in Kings Landing, trying to maneuver Jaime back into good social standing, and while he received invitations to tourneys and balls from houses wishing to ingratiate themselves, they could barely contain their scorn in his presence. Behind his back they called him a man with no honor and spit ‘kingslayer’ into the dirt when he unhorsed his opponents in the joust. 

He only accepted these invitations for the chance to see her again, to hold her in his arms if only for a single dance.If he were lucky, they might be able to steal a kiss on the balcony or press his thigh to hers at the dinner table.He had only seen her on three occasions over the two years since he slew the mad king, but just the sight of her was enough to buoy his aching soul.On each of those occasions he had asked her to marry him and each time she had turned him down.

When she had arrived this evening, looking resplendent as always, he had not been able to catch her eye. She would seemingly move away from him when he made his way over to ask for a dance.He could not understand her cold behavior towards him. Then the engagement had been announced as they sat to sup and his heart tore from his chest. He could not bring himself to take a single bite of food as he watched them accept congratulations and smile shyly at each other. 

Finally, as she excused herself to take some air he had been able to corner her in the garden.He had pulled her tight to him and kissed her and she had pushed away from him for the first time in all their many years together.‘What are you doing?!’, she had hissed. He asked her to marry him again, to run away with him this very night. Their lives in Essos would be modest but they would be together and that was all that mattered.She had looked at him with that disappointed expression he had only seen once before and he _knew_.He knew that she would marry Rhaegar. _‘I’ll be queen, Jaime,’_ , she said, taking his face between her palms, _‘You understand, don’t you?”_.But he didn’t. 

Jaime had spent the rest of the evening drinking himself into a stupor.Feeling miserable and more alone than at any point in his horribly empty life, he had sat in the corner of the great hall well into the wee hours of the night. He sat there until he could not bare to look at the stone wall for even a moment more.

Forlorn and sick with love and wine, he felt the world begin to spin as he gracelessly lowered himself to the ground.Reclining in the tall grass he took deep, even breaths and focused on the only star left in the twilit sky. _Please_ , he thought, wishing, praying to any thing that mightlisten, _please don’t let love leave me. Give me back my honor so that my love might stay’._

And then, all of a sudden, that star seems to grow bigger, brighter, nearer.He blinks his eyes, sure it must be an effect of wine.When he opens them again, the star is still hurtling towards him at alarming rate and fear seizes him.Even the heavens seem to have forsaken him.He closes his eyes again and awaits his fiery death, he has always enjoyed irony so.There is a great crash and the earth rumbles with the impact but he feels no pain.He had always expected death would hurt.He hears a great wailing moan that did not come from himself and cracks an eye open. 

He sees a great crater not more than five feet away and realizes he is not dead.There is another moan and then a voice calls out for help. Deciding he will never imbibe again,he scoots over to the edge of the crater and peers down.He sees a great bulking shape covered in soot and ash and dirt and then big, blue eyes are staring up at him.He asks the first question that comes to his mind.

“Good Gods, are you a woman?”. 


	2. Chapter 2

The eyes, a shade of blue so deep and clear they seemed to catch and glimmer even in the opaque light of the breaking dawn, narrowed as she frowned up at him. 

“Yes, of course I’m a woman!,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “What sort of question is that?What else would I be?,” the apparent woman demanded.It irked him, the way this woman scolded him for asking what seemed to Jaime a perfectly reasonable question, as though he had been the one to fall from the sky and land at her feet.If anyone were inconvenienced by this bizarre turn of events, it was certainly him.

Scooting closer to the edge of the crater he peers down, appraising her for a long moment before he clucks his tongue and shrugs.“Oh I don’t know, some sort of troll?”.He thinks her hair, tangled and singed and sticking up in all manner of directions, is fair, but she is filthy from head to toe so he can’t be certain.“A mole-person?”.Down below she harrumphs and tries to find a foothold she might use to climb out of the hole.“A snark or mayhaps a grumkin?”

She had managed to reach up and grab hold of the thick rope like roots that ran the length of the crater and was making significant progress in her escape when she paused, her too bright eyes snapping to his.They seemed to spark with her ire in the near darkness. “You are very rude,” she pants out.

He can see the tightly corded muscles of her arms and shoulders flex and shift as she pulls herself higher.Her body is long and powerful and he wonders for the first time if she might be dangerous- some demon crawling forth from the depths of one of the seven hells.But he has nothing to loose now, no reason to be afraid, and so he says, “And you are far too much a hulking beast to be a grumkin.Tell me, are all the women as monstrous as you are from wherever it is you hail?”.

She gives a shout and wrenches her arm from the dirt wall of the crater, swing it back and then up.He realizes too late that she had lobbed a large rock at him.The stone hits him on the bridge of his nose.His eyes sting with tears, blood trickles from both nostrils and he curses loudly.

“You will not mock me, Sir!It is your wish that brings me here!”, she shouts. Her face flushed red and distorted in her anger.

Jaime scoffs but the sound is more a muffled sniffle as he gently pinches at his nose, “I’ve made no wishes, and I certainly did not wish for _you_ ”.

“You did, Sir.”

He gives her a look. “I did not.”

“You _did_. You looked upon me and made a wish.I was pulled from my bed just as I had settled in for the day and cast down to aid you in your quest.How someone as arrogant and rude and ungrateful as you could possibly be deserving, I cannot know,” she wrinkles her sooty nose in distaste.“But here I am, bound by duty to help you.”

For several long seconds they stare warily at each other while Jaime tries to make sense of what she’d just said. _He’d made a wish? She’d been flung to the Earth?Was bound to help him? Surely she could not mean..._

“Are you implyingthat you are a star I wished upon come to heed my prayers?”, he asks with no small amount of incredulity. 

“Yes,” she huffs rolling her eyes with the same long suffering frustration his tutor had had for him while he stumbled over his reading as a child. “Has no one ever told you to be careful what you wish for?”

Jaime laughs then, bewildered.No one had ever told him that wishes could come true, let alone to wish wisely.“Ah, then I wasn’t so far off when I guessed grumkin”. 

He laughs again but she is not amused.He can see that her strength, considerable as it is, is waning. Her arms are beginning to tremble and she has to adjust her grip frequently but still she chances to free one hand to throw another stone at him.“Now, now,” he says quickly, “that’s enough of that.Drop that rock and I will help you out.”

She considers it carefully, as though throwing something at him might indeed be the preferable option, before she relents and drops the stone.He scoots backwards so that he can lie flat on his belly and reaches over the edge to grasp her hands. They are strong and calloused as his own but he is surprised to find the fingers are long and slender, almost graceful- or as close to grace as a creature such as herself could get. It takes all of _his_ considerable strength to pull her up and over but with a great heave she is on the ground beside him.

She had appeared large in the darkness of the crater, now though he can see the true scale of her; tall, taller than himself he suspects, with the sort of muscling that can only be achieved though rigorous physical training.He eyes her expectantly. “Well,” he says, “go on then. Grant my wish and be done with it.” Perhaps it comes out a bit rudely but the adrenaline of his near brush with death has run its course and sobered him. His hangover has already begun to set in and his head pounds and his nose throbs and it is quite past his bedtime. 

The woman, the _star_ , gapes at him, her eyes- and truly, they are an uncanny shade of blue- narrow at him again. She sighs, “I’m not...I can’t just... it doesn’t work that way,” she finally settles on.“I am _not_ a grumkin. I can’t grant wishes.”

Now it’s his turn to scowl. “But you just said-“

“I said I am bound to aid you in your quest,” she corrects him.“I cannot work miracles. I don’t have magic, not as you think of it.”

“What use are you to me then?! What exactly _can_ you do? And what do you mean ‘you are bound to me’?” He wants to be done with all of this nonsense.

“I have sworn an oath to aid those who petition me for help, as you have tonight. I cannot return home until you have achieved your goal, Sir,” she says plainly, as though any of it made any sense.

“Because you are bound to me?”

“Well I didn’t know it would be you I’d be bound to.I would not have made the vow if I had.”

Jaime throws is hands up in frustration.“Alright, then how about this. ‘I wish that you be returned to your celestial home.’There, you are free.Please go now.”

She stomps her foot, arms crossed defensively over her chest.“I have already told you, Sir, that is not how it works.”

“What if we put you in a trebuchet and fling you back to the heavens?Would that work?” She says nothing but the look she gives him is so withering that he cannot help but laugh. At his wits end, he relents. “Alright, alright. We’ll think on it after some sleep.” With that he turns and walks towards the castle.He hopes that perhaps he is already asleep and this has all been a ridiculous dream.He looks over his shoulder to see that the woman has not moved to follow him.“Come on,” he calls to her, “you are bound to me after all, aren’t you?”, he questions with a raised eyebrow.Her scowl deepens but she follows him through the doors of the keep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy reveal day! Again, I have to apologize for the wait. It’s not quite finished and I think I’ll have to add a short epilogue to tie up the story, bit I promise the fic will be finished shortly!

**Author's Note:**

> So this chapter is quite a bit of set up and there is only one true line of dialogue, I hope it didn’t read too flatly. This is my first ever fan fic so i would love to hear any thoughts you might have- if something didn’t work for you I’d like to hear that too.  
> Thanks for reading :)


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